Pages

Friday, February 24, 2012

Yesterday, I withdrew from this year's A-Z blog challenge. I did the challenge last year and had a blast and met some awesome people, but after having some long conversations and doing a lot of thinking yesterday, I realized I need to take a step or ten back in some things. Between family and homeschooling and editing and writing and blogging, I realized I have barely had any time to actually write. I'm on a deadline to finish Rising Book 2--I need a complete first draft by April, which shouldn't be a problem if I can actually sit down and do it. I know what needs to happen and I already have lots of the book written. But as April is the A-Z challenge...yeah. You see my conundrum. Even though I already had decided on my A-Z blog topics and even jotted down some ideas, I knew how the month of April and part of March would end up some bizarre blogging time-vacuum.

Plus, my kids' birthday are March and April, and one or two days for each birthday will be taken up with cake-making. Every year, I design and make the cakes for their birthdays. Last year, I made Appa from Avatar: The Last Airbender for my son:

and Wall-E for my daughter:

(Appa had, I kid you not, 22 cups of powdered sugar. It was a HUGE cake with so. much. frosting.)

I think all writers need to find a balance in what to do and what's too much and what they need to do in order to still be able to write. I have a lot of thoughts on this, but I'm still thinking over them, so I'll leave it at that.

How do you balance your writing with everything else you do?

-------------

Today's Rising blog tour is a review of the book over at the incredible Donna Weaver's blog.

12 comments:

Those are terrific cakes! Just don't let my kids see them. Their birthdays are all in March and April, too.

This balancing thing can be difficult, especially when you want to spend enough time with the kids (and need to). The first victim by us is always the household -which doesn't really bother me as long as it doesn't turn into trash central and there's always enough underwear in the drawers. And food on the table...

The kids are definitely top priority. And the rest... we work on a day to day basis.

It is SOOOOOO hard finding a balance!!! I mean, if it were easy, there wouldn't be all kinds of self-development classes and books on the subject (I have to register for personal development classes for work...there are lots of classes on "balance," lol. And, apparently, I need to hear it often.)

Those cakes are amazing!!!! My son would love all of those or the Lightning McQueen cake. Hello Kitty not so much. My daughter probably wouldn't care much as long as she got to eat it. Right now we're just trying to find something egg and dairy free that remotely resembles cake that we can feed to our son for his birthday in a couple weeks.

How do I balance? Not so well. I just do my best and then be happy with it. Blogging does come after writing though.

Ahhh, you will be missed at the challenge but I understand. I just blogged about balance myself. It is difficult! Since I have a "day job", I find it challenging to write anything but I try. Your cakes are amazing :)